Memory Alpha:Pages for deletion/Arachnophobia
This is a page to discuss the suggestion to delete " ". *If you are suggesting a page for deletion, add your initial rationale to the section "Deletion rationale". *If you want to discuss this suggestion, add comments to the section "Discussion". *If a consensus has been reached, an administrator will explain the final decision in the section "Admin resolution". In all cases, please make sure to read and understand the deletion policy before editing this page. Deletion rationale The term arachnophobia was never mentioned and nor were "arachnophobe" or "arachnophobic". This is what we do have in the three episodes cited: * : Pike says "I hate spiders" * : In one scene, O'Brien indicates he's got experience with fear of arachnids, and Barclay says he's not bothered by them. Then in a later scene, O'Brien is show comfortable with a spider, while Barclay apparently shows some unease with it. * : Crusher notes that Barclay has been transformed into a spider and has a disease named after him, to which Troi replies that she'll better clear her calendar for the next few weeks That seems like an exceptionally weak case for having an arachnophobia article. I don't generally mind spiders but I'd initially be a bit uncomfortable if I were suddenly confronted with a hand-sized one. And saying you hate spiders doesn't exactly get you diagnosed with a phobia either. And in Genesis, Barclay is to be treated for the traumatic experience of changing into a spider, not for fear of spiders - that one's an outright misinterpretation. There's the O'Brien case, but that still got the problem of him never naming his fear. -- Capricorn (talk) 05:16, May 11, 2019 (UTC) Discussion *'Merge' content with Spider. 31dot (talk) 09:40, May 11, 2019 (UTC) *'Agreed', plus I suggest merging O'Brien's problem with fear, including a bg note for the proper term for this fear. --LauraCC (talk) 15:56, May 11, 2019 (UTC) Admin resolution * Merged with spider and deleted link. --Alan (talk) 15:09, January 31, 2020 (UTC) Follow-up So I deleted this on the good faith that the discussion was well researched, but I'm now having second thoughts about that conclusion. Arachnophobia: the fear of spiders. O'Brien and Barclay are discussing fears in "Realm of Fear", beginning with O'Brien's observation of Barclay's transporter phobia. He relates: * O'BRIEN: I know how you feel about this, sir. * BARCLAY: You're afraid of transporting, too? * O'BRIEN: No. Arachnids. Sickening, crawly little things, don't you think? All those legs. * BARCLAY: Spiders? They've never bothered me. So to be clear: "You're afraid of transporting, too?" / "No. Arachnids." Knowing that if A = B then B = A, then if "afraid of transporting" = "transporter phobia", then "afraid of arachnids" = "arachnophobia". O'Brien then explained how he overcame his fear, "It was the hardest thing I ever did, but I got through it. After that, I was never quite as afraid of spiders." Again, "afraid of spiders", the literal definition of arachnophobia. How or why this was so easily overlooked as "a weak case" or however it was stated, needs to be re-evaluated. --Alan (talk) 17:08, February 3, 2020 (UTC) :I wasn't involved in the original discussion, but I suspect the deletion request was based on the fact that the specific term or word "arachnophobia" was never used, rather than "fear of spiders" or "fear of arachnids" (even though they're the same thing). We probably have other articles, though, that reference something that appeared on screen even though the specific term never did. Frequently it's better to use a real-world term for something on-screen that also appears in the real world, even though the term itself isn't on screen. -- Renegade54 (talk) 20:39, February 3, 2020 (UTC) In a sense that is a cop out. For example, we see a picture of a "car" on screen, we call it a "car" (hell, we take it a step further in most cases and identify the year, make and model). No one may have said it was a "car", but we are visually identifying it as a "car", therefore we have an article about a "car". If we hear the word "car" in dialogue, we write an article about a "car", based on some generic understanding of what a car is: "a land-based four-wheel motor-powered vehicle", or whatever, whether John Doe character defined the term mid-sentence or not. In this case, we have the definition of a term, "afraid of spiders", but we can't extrapolate that the term from the meaning, "arachnophobia"? We use our senses all the time to visually and aurally identify almost literally everything, this should be no different in terms of taking an idea and creating a common sense article out of it. It's already silly enough the following are true examples of possible articles extracted from various dialogue references that are titled by their definitions: Fear of alien abduction • Fear of death • Fear of failure • Fear of the future • Fear of heights • Fear of intimacy • Fear of losing control • Fear of punishment. --Alan (talk) 22:32, February 3, 2020 (UTC) ::First off, "afraid of spiders" is not the literal definition of arachnophobia; it's a clinical condition that takes a little more then that to be diagnosed. Secondly, creating an article needn't always be the best way to document something, and I think that unless arachophobia is specifically singled out for mention, pages like spider are both fair and adequate places to document the assorted ways characters have thought about or interacted with spiders. To be honest I'm skeptical we really need those redlinked "fear of" articles either, especially when we have an article on fear, but it seems that while we're not a dictionary we're turning more and more into an index of common phrases. ::Things like cars are different in my view because that's a very unambiguous situation, if a car is a certain model, it's a certain model. But singling out recognizable situations and putting a label on them is a lot more subjective interpretation then it might seem to the user creating them. The induced self-destruction page turned on some of the same issues, it was often seen but never named. Alan, you were very vocal in wanting that page to die, I wonder if your thinking has shifted. -- Capricorn (talk) 10:20, February 5, 2020 (UTC) :Two comments: Alan, it may not have seemed so, but I was actually agreeing with you. :) I apologize if I wasn't clear in that respect. And Capricorn, I tend to agree with you as well as far as the proliferation of definitions of rather common words and phrases, although I do see some value in having a method of listing or referencing articles in which words, phrases, etc. occur. -- Renegade54 (talk) 17:13, February 5, 2020 (UTC) MA may not be a dictionary, but when well crafted, and several examples exist, so-called dictionary entries have established a sufficient life of their own on this wiki. Otherwise, like it or not, no matter how you choose to twist it into your own liking, my statement about arachnophobia still rings true. Clinically or not, I'm pretty sure my own personal fear of being locked in a small dark box is still claustrophobia, whether I call it that myself or have a medical professional make the claim on my behalf. O'Brien was doing very much the same thing in drawing his analogy to Barclay's phobia. --Alan (talk) 18:04, February 5, 2020 (UTC) ::You've made that jump of calling your fear a phobia. Nothing wrong with that, but O'Brien did not. Why should we do it for him when we already have the pages fear and spider? And on an aside, I am starting to get really fucking tired of these little insinuations that I'm twisting things or have nominated this page in bad faith. You have an attitude problem when it comes to people who don't completely agree with what you've decided should be done. -- Capricorn (talk) 18:36, February 5, 2020 (UTC)